by James Philip
Six degrees of separation…
By some bizarre quirk of fate, it had transpired that Veronica Myles was one of Caro’s distant, three or four times removed as best she could establish, cousin on, she thought, her father’s side of the family. Uncannily, it happened that Veronica, her junior by about fifteen years, vaguely resembled her younger self and it was this which had redoubled the poor woman’s agonies when she was finally brought before Edwin Mertz, the Lord High Inquisitor of the End of Days, as the war in the Midwest had reached its violent crescendo.
Mertz, imagining he had been betrayed by the poor woman’s husband - an End of Dayer sent to Washington to assassinate Caro, who had been captured immediately he set foot in US-held Michigan – had had Veronica’s two surviving young children killed in front of her eyes.
Thomas Myles, Veronica’s husband, was among the dozen, eleven men and one woman, selected for the first, most public of all the tribunals planned in the coming months.
It had happened that when Mertz laid eyes on Veronica, he had believed, insofar as Caro could unravel the extremity of his psychosis – it was so extraordinarily twisted by then that little could be divined with meaningful diagnostic certainty – he had thought he was actually confronting Caro’s ghost.
There had been a kind of twisted, perverted logic to that.
Caro had, after all, been his confessor; his one apparent friend and confidante from the outside world in all those long, lost years in prison in Illinois and possibly, the only woman he had ever, as ridiculous as it sounded, loved. Albeit, ‘loved’ in a fashion particular to him which would be unrecognisable to the majority of ‘sane’ people in the rest of the world. And then, when the war had come, she had been the one standing at his enemy’s shoulder, taunting him on national networked television and radio, feeding lies and contemptuous rhetoric to the papers, conspiring with the apostate ungodly in Washington to destroy him.
In any event, encountering Veronica face to face, it seemed that Mertz had had some kind of temporarily disabling psychotic incident, and as the US Marines and Army had closed in on him in those last days and hours of the doomed ‘Kingdom’ he had raped, and incredibly, formed some kind of bond with Veronica, his prisoner and Caro-like avatar, attempting to take her with him as he tried to make his long-planned escape.
It was only thanks to the testimony of a badly wounded British Special Forces officer, Major, now Lieutenant Colonel Julian Calder, then serving with the 22nd Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment, who was subsequently awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour for his part in the Battle of Berlin (he had been under US Command at the time and therefore was deemed an ‘honorary’ American), that the parts of the story blocked out by Veronica’s trauma, had been belatedly pieced together.
In the aftermath of the battle, Veronica had been found wandering the battlefield, arrested and held as a suspected End of Dayer before the Englishman’s reports from his hospital bed, spoke of a woman dressed in white who had picked up his discarded ‘scalping knife’ – with a wicked seven or eight-inch blade, serrated on one side, razor-sharp on the other – and attacked Mertz as he was about to blow Calder’s brains out.
When Mertz had been carried away by his bodyguards, screaming apparently, like a ‘stuck pig’, Veronica Myles had picked up the soldier’s Browning nine-millimetre pistol and pursued the party through the smoke-clogged woods, to where, a few minutes later she had stepped in front of the helicopter into which the stricken Lord High Inquisitor had been loaded, and emptied the contents of its magazine through the cockpit window into the aircraft’s pilot’s face and torso. Whereupon, the helicopter had lifted off and within seconds, crashed in flames, killing everybody on board.
Veronica Myles travails had not ended there.
Whilst in protective custody in Nebraska it was discovered that she was pregnant. At the time she was near-catatonic most days, not surprisingly having suffered a complete breakdown shortly after her apprehension in the burning forests around Berlin the day after the battle. Later, she claimed, or thought she recollected, being raped, including being gang-raped once, several times before she was brought before Mertz, who had also raped her. So, she had no idea who the father of her child was.
Caro had only met her three months into her pregnancy, recognising immediately, that contrarily the younger woman had clung to the reality of the foetus growing inside her womb, knowing it might one day be the sole anchor of her sanity.
It had been a surreal first encounter.
‘Yes, I see now how he could have mistaken me for you,’ Veronica had murmured.
Not even the gung-ho, ambitious attorneys the Army had hurriedly commissioned – at the temporary ranks of Major to Brigadier – to prosecute the leading defendants, had shown any enthusiasm for calling Veronica Myles to the witness box; accepting without demur Caro’s opinion that the poor woman’s written testimony, extracted from her over weeks of deposition under Caro’s watchful supervision, would have to suffice.
Caro wished the idiots had taken some of her other advice, too. But then lawyers were a law unto themselves; so, one had to settle for small mercies. And besides, she was confident that if and when either May Ellen, or Sally Jane, were called before the MWCT, they would be handled with the softest of kid gloves.
The show was indeed on the road.
“The Defendants in this inaugural tribunal are each, singly and in many cases, jointly charged with committing crimes so heinous to be beyond the normal comprehension of most decent Americans,” the Chairman of the War Crimes Tribunal announced in stentorian solemnity. “Such charges demand the highest standards of evidence and will be prosecuted with exemplary jurisprudence…”
Caro tried not to shake her head.
All the big trials were pre-ordained slam-dunks!
How could it be otherwise when the men responsible for designing the MWCT’s protocols had taken the Nuremburg Tribunals as their template.
The prosecutors had their ducks neatly lined up like main battle tanks with their guns loaded and zeroed in on their targets, sitting helplessly, trussed up at point blank range.
Caro had no doubt that this model of justice was going to work just fine with the first tranches of zealots, misfits and criminal scumbags due to be processed through the system; unfortunately, later, when peripheral figures and people who had just got caught on the wrong side of the fence when the 1964 rebellion and the 1966 Civil war broke out, came before the subordinate courts, it was unlikely to deliver any real justice to anybody. The trouble was that, given that there was no political or legal appetite for, at some stage, calling an amnesty any time soon – that would probably have to wait many, many years – the process was going to get messier, and messier as time went by, rather like the pursuit of Nazi and Japanese war criminals after the headline trials of 1946.
Caro turned as Sally Jane sniffled, then sobbed.
The cameras had panned around to scan the faces of the accused, lingering for a moment on the face of a gaunt, unshaven, dazed man in his forties.
Harvey Bruce Jansen, junior, the last commander of the 17th/20th Legion of the Janesville Brigade of the Army of the End of Days, who as a company commander had brought his soldiers into the Madison Baby Farm, where the hundreds of women confined therein, were routinely subjected to a regime of brutal gang rapes until the confirmation of their pregnancies.
Jansen had raped both Ellen May and Sally Jane, the latter still only fifteen at the time; demanding his officer’s ‘first crack’ at the godless whores at the Madison Camp, a cold, dirty wire and wooden-hutted compound erected in front of the ruined State Capitol Building.
Jansen’s unit had also participated in the mass execution of the US Army officers and NCOs captured when the city had surrendered to rebel forces in 1964; an atrocity conducted in front of the hundreds of women – Ellen May and Sally Jane included – incarcerated at the camp.
It was only the first of many such mass murders they were to witness in th
e coming months as both women fought to survive, their bellies ever more swollen not knowing what was in store for them, or their unborn babies. In the event, their babies were literally torn from them at birth, and to this day they had no idea if they had been passed to ‘families of the faith’ to raise, or drowned, or their heads dashed against the ground, or if they lived or had died the night they were born. Thereafter, their duty and their penance for their alleged crimes against the Kingdom of the End of Days partially expunged, they had been taken from the camp to begin a life of servitude within the Kingdom, whores to be used as their theocratic masters and mistresses saw fit…
Had Harvey Bruce Jansen not been a friend, and a Korean War buddy of Ellen May’s dead veteran husband, who had fallen in 1953, he might have gone unrecognised. At least, for those atrocities he was involved in at Madison. Jansen, of course, had not recognised Ellen May – despite having met her several times at the State VA Office in Madison where she worked for many years – or given a second thought to raping his old buddy’s teenage daughter. Horrifically, in the scale of things, his crimes at Madison palled into insignificance with those later stacked against his name elsewhere in Wisconsin and Indiana during the Civil War.
Both mother and daughter were sobbing now. Carol rose and went to kneel before the women. Each took one of her hands and soon they were in a tearful group hug.
Nathan, meanwhile, quietly turned off the TV and went into the kitchen, knowing the women needed to be alone and that they needed him to be calm, and unthreatening which was a big problem because right then he wanted pick up his service pistol and blow off Harvey Bruce Jansen’s balls!
Chapter 12
Monday 29th April, 1968
Buffalo, New York State
Larry O’Brien had had reservations – well, huge doubts and something of an existential crisis of conflicted loyalties – when his friend, Jack Kennedy had made that initial approach to him two months ago.
‘Let me get this right; this is all Claude Betancourt’s idea? And he wants me to run Walter Brenckmann’s campaign?’
JFK had smiled at that, then shaken his head.
‘No, Claude tells me that Walter Brenckmann is the kind of guy who is always the captain of his own ship. Trust me, it takes one old Navy man to recognise another. Anybody who has ever been to sea will tell you they always know when the Captain’s on the bridge…’
Nonetheless, O’Brien had gone away and thought about it for several days before asking for an interview with the Ambassador; whom, up until then he had regarded as a well-intentioned loser when it came to the Primary race.
‘I was starting to feel guilty not getting behind George McGovern,’ he had confessed to the Boston attorney who had spent most of his professional life ‘fixing’ thorny problems behind the scenes for the Betancourt empire, and by implication, the Kennedy clan. However, few people knew much about that side of the candidate’s life. Insofar, as Walter Brenckmann had a significant public profile it was as the bluff naval officer who had been America’s man in Oxford in times of crisis, and as one of the men who had stood beside Curtis LeMay at the height of the Battle of Washington, defending the White House in December 1963.
On the credit part of the ledger, from what O’Brien had heard, Gretchen Betancourt has established a slew of useful high-level and very public connections with the East Coast press and more importantly, the TV networks. That woman was going to be a real player; although, not perhaps, yet.
There was something very solid, innately trustworthy, and rock-steady about Walter Brenckmann. He had the wry gravitas of a man who understood his own strengths and limitations and basically, did not tell lies. He was never going to be a man for great rhetorical flourishes – even if Ted Sorenson came on board – but old political hacks like O’Brien knew, they just knew, he was going to be a master of cutting one-liners in debate.
New Hampshire had been the Brenckmann for President Campaign’s nadir. Next up, the Ambassador had nearly got twenty percent of the vote in Pennsylvania and nearly won the, sadly meaningless, Wisconsin caucus which did not elect delegates to the National Convention. Nor was he going to pick up any delegates in the DC primary in eight days’ time, but his numbers were on the up in Ohio, and he might even win in Indiana, another war-ravaged and tragically diminished state. Thus far, McGovern had won all the big fights, and got over sixty percent of the available delegates in his pocket but it was still, relatively early days and Gretchen had established a sounder campaigning foundation, coast to coast, than she probably knew.
In fact, Larry O’Brien strongly suspected that she had attempted to mimic the organisation he had set up back in 1959 and 1960 for JFK.
That said, not the least of Larry O’Brien’s ‘reservations’ had been to do with how well Claude Betancourt’s daughter would take her demotion, albeit softened by the gift of the 4th Congressional District of Massachusetts.
Personally, now he had got to know her a little better, O’Brien reckoned she ought to have spent the last year getting elected to Congress, not burying herself in what had always been the longest, of long-shot Presidential campaigns. But that failed to take into account Gretchen’s devotion to her father-in-law, not to mention to Joanne Brenckmann; who literally, treated Gretchen like a daughter.
Apparently, after the New Hampshire debacle, Walter had sat down with Gretchen and told her the news, and later Joanne had hugged her as both women shed tears. And then, as implausible as it sounded, they had all moved on.
Within days, Gretchen had been bending O’Brien’s ear about her own race in Boston like he was her wise old uncle. Which was a little surreal but at the time he had hardly known Dan, or the other brothers and he was still feeling his way with the Ambassador and his wife. That was still only a few weeks back; but it seemed like months, a lifetime.
‘The world is a dangerous place, Larry,’ Walter Brenckmann had told him last month. ‘Khrushchev and JFK tripped over each other one day five years ago; it was an accident, neither of them planned to kill hundreds of millions of people. They weren’t the problem. Our political systems were, and remain mutually antagonistic, that was a problem for sure. The real cause of the Cuban Missiles disaster was the post-Second War settlement. Nixon isn’t wrong looking to make an accommodation with the Soviets; he’s only doing what the British did for hundreds of years in Western Europe: trying to maintain the balance of power. But the lesson of history is that you don’t maintain the balance of power, or in the modern world, of terror, by making nice with one’s strongest ally. If Henry Kissinger had still been a player; Nixon would have befriended the Chinese Communists, presently, the weaker of our potential global allies. As it is, we’re likely to be at war with the Chongqing regime by election day; probably, long before, the way we’re headed. We, the Democrats, owe it to the American people to make damned sure that there is an honest man in the White House next year to sort out the mess. Even if Nixon wins in November, he’s got too much baggage. He’s so crooked even a GOP-controlled House will, sooner or later, impeach him.’
O’Brien had listened to the analysis, thinking his thoughts and wondering where his candidate’s critique was taking him.
‘Nixon has driven a wagon train through the Constitution, acted like a tyrant, in fact,’ Walter Brenckmann had gone on, regretfully. ‘When I am President, I will allow the courts to deal with that. By rights the man ought to go to jail for a long time. Presidents of the United States have a higher duty, their duty to the American people. Every man, woman and child.’
Now, as the entourage disembarked from the convoy of cars which had driven deep into the now greening ruins of what had once been the great city of Buffalo, Larry O’Brien was struck by the dignity and the pathos of this moment of long-delayed remembrance.
And aware, belatedly, with spine-tingling anticipation, of the way it would play with the nation…
Larry O’Brien had had nothing to do with this event; it had been planned months ago. Gretchen had done
a lot of the leg work to organise it, and apparently, Joanne had had a hand in its choreography. Either way, he knew that he could not have invented, let alone imagined a day like this, and that it was probably the defining act of the whole campaign.
It was just that nobody had figured that out yet.
The Ambassador had decreed that there would be no campaigning that day, although inevitably the crowd of newsmen, photographers and one New York State-based, and two network – ABC and Columbia – TV crews had been impossible to shake off that morning as Walter Brenckmann, his wife Joanne, son Walter junior in his Navy uniform, Dan and Gretchen, youngest son Sam and his wife, Judy, escorted by the whole travelling campaign team, visited ground zero at the site of what had once been Buffalo Zoo.
O’Brien knew that the Brenckmann’s shaggy-headed, chart-topping, multi-millionaire pop, rock, folk, soul singer-musician, and his wife had visited Camp Little Bear at New Richmond, Wisconsin, yesterday to pay their respects at the grave of Judy’s first husband, Master Sergeant Michael J. Dorfmann, killed by a sniper’s bullet some hours after the cease fire had been declared at the end of the first Midwest Rebellion at the end of 1964. Afterwards, Sam – accompanied in several duets by Judy - had played a benefit concert for the five hundred men of the Wisconsin National Guard posted to the still, lonely, frontier-like garrison in the middle of the western wasteland of the war-ravaged state.
The mood of the Brenckmann family was sombre.
There were tears in Joanne’s eyes, and in the eyes of Dan and Sam, and their wives; although oddly, Walter Brenckmann senior, and junior, were each as solemnly composed, holding their grief to themselves. The latter’s composure survived, even when Gretchen drew him into an unlikely group hug with her husband.